COLLINS COLUMN: Penn State offense running at full speed

JUSTIN HAYWORTH / ASSOCIATED PRESS
Penn State quarterback Matt McGloin throws a pass in the first half against Iowa on Saturday.

IOWA CITY, Iowa

They call it the NASCAR package, and in their last few games, that used to be fitting.

When the Penn State coaching staff wanted to put a bit of pace into the offense, they'd let Matt McGloin hurry the team to the line, read the defense, call a play and run it.

And they'd do that over and over again, until the Nittany Lions hit the end zone or tired out a defense.

The point of the NASCAR package, after all, was to go fast.

It's not appropriate to say the NASCAR package is what buried unsuspecting Iowa on Saturday night at Kinnick Stadium. It's too difficult to call it a package now. The Nittany Lions ran it all the time. They rode it for 90 plays, for a 31-point lead by the time fans settled into their seats in the second half, a 38-14 win in hostile Kinnick Stadium and perhaps, into national prominence.

The no-huddle made the Nittany Lions look like Jimmie Johnson's Chevy and the Iowa defense my father's Saturn. It made McGloin look like Tom Brady statistically. It made a bunch of receivers nobody had ever heard of in August look like as good a group as any school in the Big Ten can boast.

Penn State took last week off, and it was almost as if coach Bill O'Brien realized that the no-huddle, NASCAR package would look much better if it was used less sparingly.

"I didn't think we could come in here and just huddle and break the huddle and run a normal pace," O'Brien said. "I felt like our guys were learning about the pace we want to play with better and better every week. For three quarters, I think they did what we wanted them to do, and then it got a little sloppy. They need to learn about playing for 60 minutes."

He's right about getting sloppy in the fourth quarter. But the bottom line is, it's not a package anymore. It's an offense. The NASCAR offense.

Let's put it this way: All that National Coach of the Year hype that O'Brien tried to pooh-pooh over the last two weeks is only going to get stronger now. To realize why, you only need to look at the numbers.

You only need to look at what Penn State used to be offensively, and Iowa is the perfect defense to judge that against.

This has been a series definied in the last decade by blood-and-guts defense. This is the series, after all, that treated fans to a 6-4 thriller in 2004, in which Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz commanded his punter to take an intentional safety rather than risk getting a punt blocked for a touchdown in the end zone.

In last year's game, a 13-3 win for the Nittany Lions, Penn State ran a whopping 72 plays. They amassed 395 total yards. They scored one touchdown. Gaudy offensive statistics, these were not. But Penn State dominated that game, anyway. And it didn't seem like all that terrible an offensive effort at the time.

"We're just getting more and more comfortable with it each and every week," McGloin said. "I couldn't even tell you how many plays we have in there, and it's just one word. Everybody knows the play. Everybody knows the formation. It's just what we do throughout the week. It's not something you can just learn overnight. We constantly learn it. We constantly study it.

"Defenses just keep getting tired. And we're able to just keep pushing."

Defenses keep getting tired.

Defenses, actually, have no chance.

From his receiver position, sophomore Allen Robinson said he can easily discern the stress the NASCAR offense puts on defenses, even ones as sound fundamentally, as tough physically, as the Hawkeyes.

Defenses have little opportunity to put in different personnel because of the pace, he said. And even if they can get it on the field, it's difficult to do anything special, any disguised coverages, any exotic blitzes, because those take time to organize.

"It's just so fast," Robinson said, "you really can't tell everybody on the field exactly what to do."

Adrian Amos would concur.

The sophomore cornerback goes against the no-huddle offense every day in practice, and he said that might be part of the reason the Nittany Lions defense has been so good in recent weeks against spread teams, like Illinois and Northwestern. But he knows the toll it takes on a defense, physically and mentally. He knows Iowa's pain. He sees 90 plays on the stat sheet at the end of the game, and he cringes.

"Hurry-up just seems regular to us, because we see it all the time in practice," Amos said.

In his press conference on media day, way back in early August, O'Brien warned reporters that while the Penn State offense would be modeled after the offense he ran with the New England Patriots the last two seasons, it wouldn't appear as productive.

Don't expect 35 points per game, he warned.

That seemed like reasonable advice at the time, because there were so many question marks surrounding this team. There were so many national columnists predicting gloom and doom for this team that it was difficult to believe it wasn't at the very least a possibility. There weren't many among even the most optimistic who'd have guessed the Nittany Lions would turn into an offensive juggernaut.

But all of a sudden, O'Brien looks like he was sandbagging back in August. The Nittany Lions have scored 30 or more points in four of their last five games. There's no denying that this group has come along faster than maybe even O'Brien would have thought.

The best evidence of that is that they are doing what he said they wouldn't. They're running the Patriots offense. No-huddle and all. Call it NASCAR, if you want. But realize, it's what Penn State is doing on offense. For the rest of 2012. And for as long as Bill O'Brien is in charge.

The Iowa Hawkeyes, the team so used to seeing a Penn State offense try to overpower them and standing up to the onslaught so well for so long, had no answers for Penn State's precision, for its speed, for its determined drive to put them away early.

They were the perfect foil to Penn State's past. The Hawkeyes, though, couldn't stand up to the future.

Contact the writer: dcollins@timesshamrock.com

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